An ongoing review of politics and culture

Heather MacDonald’s recent essay in City Journal is a classic example of what our British friends call “over-egging the pudding.” Here’s her title: “Is the Criminal-Justice System Racist?” And then the subhead: “No: the high percentage of blacks behind bars reflects crime rates, not bigotry.” Note the implication: if incarceration-rates-by-race match crime-rates-by-race, then the criminal justice system is not racist.

But that’s silly. First, incarcerations rates are just one metric among many; and second, questions like this can’t be settled by assuming the existence of an on/off switch: Racist/Not-Racist. MacDonald makes a serious rhetorical mistake in her very first paragraph: she quotes Senator Obama’s claim that blacks “are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, [and] receive very different sentences . . . for the same crime,” and then addresses the second claim only with fifteen-year-old data and fails to address the third claim at all.

MacDonald does a pretty good job of defending her claim that incarceration-rates-by-race reflect crimes-committed-by-race, so why can’t she leave it at that? Instead, she determines to use evidence on that one point to justify the absurdly sweeping claim that the American criminal-justice system is utterly free from racism. Let’s let our claims be commensurate with the evidence we provide, please.

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As you say, this is an impossible issue to nail down. Too many complexities at too many levels for a simple dichotomy.

Here’s some data regarding Obama’s charge that blacks and whites “receive very different sentences for the same crime”: Bureau of Justice Statistics

If I were a Criminal Justice System advocate (I’m not), I’d point out that the total mean length of felony sentences for Whites (37 mo) and Blacks (40 mo) is not significant enough to support Obama’s assertion. I’d also point out that, counterintuitively (counterintuitively if you buy into a central tenet of racialist philosophy), Whites receive on average 109 months for Sexual Assault crimes, compared to 105 months for Blacks.

The obvious response to this is that Blacks receive more total months for Murder, Robbery and Aggravated Assault. However (I’d reply), most of those extra months come from probation, which is, again, counterintuitive (Blacks get on average 63 months probation for murder, compared to Whites getting 54). And even if you find this probation argument unpersuasive, there’s still the very real possibility that these higher numbers for Murder, Robbery, and Aggravated Assault among Blacks simply reflect the fact that these crimes are far larger problems in majority-Black communities, and therefore need greater amounts of deterrence.

But these are snapshot arguments, and don’t get into the causal structures behind the numbers (in addition to the other problem that, literally, an infinite of hypotheses can be fit on top of a single set of data). Nor do they address other issues like the Crack vs. Cocaine sentencing disparity, the tendency for prosecutors to strike black jurors in a capital crime case against a black defendant, or the high levels of distrust and fear in Black communities toward the police, and the reduction to tribal lawlessness and vigilantism that might produce.

Underneath all of this, of course, is the Drug War, and what happens when a man or woman has no recourse to the courts to enforce contracts, and no recourse to the police to report theft. Ultimately, we’re going to have to face up to this issue and decide whether we want an interminable orbit around a high-crime, high-incarceration, high-alienation, and high-drug-use equilibrium (that we orbit such an equilibrium is beyond refutation), or whether we’ll just suck it up and deal with addicts via the family and community and only belatedly (i.e., after they commit a real crime) via the criminal justice system.

The only way to both lower crime and increase the sense of justice in the population is to only have absolutely necessary crimes on the books, and then enforce them strictly, unapologetically, and fairly.

Proving that the criminal justice system is biased against blacks is one of the Holy Grails of the American social science. An academic who could do it would be a superstar. But, it hasn’t been done … because the evidence is overwhelmingly against it.

It’s worth turning to America’s leading expert on crime, political scientist James Q. Wilson, author of Thinking About Crime. Wilson contributed a chapter to Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, a 2002 book edited by the Thernstroms. In it, he wrote:

“A central problem—perhaps the central problem—in improving the relationship between white and black Americans is the difference in racial crime rates. No matter how innocent or guilty a stranger may be, he carries with him in public the burdens or benefits of his group identity…

“Estimating the crime rates of racial groups is, of course, difficult because we only know the arrest rate. If police are more (or less) likely to arrest a criminal of a given race, the arrest rate will overstate (or understate) the true crime rate. To examine this problem, researchers have compared the rate at which criminal victims report (in the National Crime Victimization Survey, or NCVS) the racial identity of whoever robbed or assaulted them with the rate at which the police arrest robbers or assaulters of different races. Regardless of whether the victim is black or white, there are no significant differences between victim reports and police arrests. This suggests that, though racism may exist in policing (as in all other aspects of American life), racism cannot explain the overall black arrest rate. The arrest rate, thus, is a reasonably good proxy for the crime rate.

“Black men commit murders at a rate about eight times greater than that for white men. This disparity is not new; it has existed for well over a century. When historian Roger Lane studied murder rates in Philadelphia, he found that since 1839 the black rate has been much higher than the white rate. This gap existed long before the invention of television, the wide distribution of hand guns, or access to dangerous drugs (except for alcohol).”

Begging your pardon Sailer, but I’m not going to swallow it at face value, because I side with JA, and because it’s one of those issues that gets commonly twisted by partisans and I’d want to research Wilson’s biases before I swallow.

I’ll give you this much; I came to the comments to remark that Ms. MacDonald seems one of those ostrich types. I’ll leave saying maybe I am.

btw, Prof. Jacobs, I left a comment on your Asimov post, and when I came back it was gone. Does that sort of thing happen here, or must I have failed to hit the submit button?

If this is true . . . “Estimating the crime rates of racial groups is, of course, difficult because we only know the arrest rate. If police are more (or less) likely to arrest a criminal of a given race, the arrest rate will overstate (or understate) the true crime rate.” . . .

How could we possibly know this? “Black men commit murders at a rate about eight times greater than that for white men.”